Ghosts Stories - lee wen 李文

"Ghosts Stories" 
        In Singapore literature, Ghost Stories easily make their mark on the best‑seller list. Although many people today have lost touch with the religious and spiritual life, they still harbor an irrational fear of ghosts. Ghosts are the dead appearing to the living or more often than not mere inventions of the human mind. The fear of them indicates a lack of under­standing our cosmology, our psyche, our life and death. Through inquiring the nature of this fear, I explore various aspects of this fear and parallel them with social relationships such as paranoia, prejudices. Questioning this phenomenon, I find that it shows nostalgia for the irrational in what would otherwise look like a hyper-rationalized and ultra-managed nation-state. "Ghost Stories" juxtaposes this return of the repressed irrational with another repression that pervades society: the paranoia that leads to self-censorship experienced by individuals in a society one would find it hard to deny is effectively 'authoritarian'.


"Ghosts Stories" was presented in

1. Performance, 2nd Nippon International Performance Art Festival (NIPAF). Tokyo and Nagano, February 1995
   
2. Mixed Media Installation
   "Beyond the Borders", Kwangju Biennale, Kwangju, South Korea, September ‑ November 1995
   
3. Performance and installation
   "Simposio International De Escultura Mexico-Japan", Chiapa de Corso, Chiapas, Mexico, February 1996.